“What does it feel like to drive into San Francisco?” I was asked.
“It feels like the first day of fall,” I answered.
By which I meant: achingly nostalgic, potent with memory, dreamlike and otherworldly, thrilling, melancholy, and surrounded by a sense of unidentified loss.
This was the highlight of my August: Arriving in Northern California for a trip full of fleeting images that hardly seem real: a family of river otters backstroking around a waterlily lagoon, a meadow spread across buttercream-colored hills dotted with black cows, a eucalyptus grove leading to a field of marigolds being snacked upon by massive ravens, and a sheet of fog peeling back on the cliffs like a picture book being flipped to the next page.
This little part of the world awakens such an intense feeling inside my belly, I’m not sure I can describe it. It’s like intense grief for something that I actually never lost, and was never mine in the first place.
I was born there, but didn’t grow up there. My dad lived there, but I’ve never been to his house. Perhaps it’s a region that’s loaded with unfinished feelings.
In any case, it’s just beautiful, and my soul was jumping up and down spinning and trying to salsa dance the whole time I was roaming around the coastline.
Wonders abounded: water buffalo milk ice cream, horseback riding on swampy beaches, osprey nests and cougar dens, and sun-cooked escarole plucked from the innkeeper’s porch.
So my first recommendation of the month is that you go to Marin County at some point in life.
Here are the rest of my recommendations on what to listen to/read/see/eat/buy/do/be from August: